Unfortunately, there are some people who stubbornly cling to their perceptions, despite the preponderance of information otherwise..... They tend to muck up threads that try and advance our knowledge because they cannot move beyond what they already think that they know.

This thread was not designed to uncover the gilding that occurs with many people's recounting of history. This thread was not designed to diminish the enormous contributions that significant people have made in helping our art. This thread was not designed to prop up some, while knocking down others.

This thread was to help highlight the situation that we find ourselves in today.

Quote:

Gerardo Torres wrote:

As Marc Abrams suggested, it's less imperative to discuss lineages thatn it is to concentrate on what the Founder was really doing and work to replicate it.

This point that Gerardo made is where I wanted the next step of this thread to go and should hopefully be our focus in our own training. Due to the idiosyncrasies of O'Sensei (not pathologically paranoid like I believe Takeda Sensei was), due to changes in pre-war and post-war Japan, due to a host of other circumstances, it is practically impossible to assert that O'Sensei passed on all that he knew in any manner, shape or form, to any one of his students (including his son). It behooves any one of us not to look inside and outside of our art in order to try and re-create to the best of our abilities that with which we will most likely never be able to re-create. O'Sensei was a remarkable personality, filled with quirks, positives and negatives. He was a remarkable martial artist who unfortunately did not see to it that all that he knew was passed on. We have a number of people still alive today who did learn from O'Sensei, each taking what they could. We have a number of people outside of our art (Dan, Ark, Mike, etc.) who can open our eyes to things that we can put back into our art to bring the art closer to what the founder was doing. Myopic idol worship of some people and the worship of some ideas that exist best in philosophy and not in reality, are sadly too common.

If we want to progress, while raising the over-all level of our art, we need to be honest with ourselves and recognize that what we "know" is serving more to interfere with our ability to learn more about our art, than it is in helping us better the art that so many of us love and have dedicated our lives to understanding and teaching.